What's New in Neurofeedback

• Over time, memories may grow more positive
• Study Compares Brain Aneurysm Treatments
• Robot Interfaces With Brain
• 'Free Radical' Molecules May Help Drive Brain Illnesses
• Multimedia Babies: Good News, Bad News
• Freethinking scientist ponders the brain
• A Tale of Two Schools
• Inside the Autistic Mind
• Strokes in children: A medical dilemma
• The Spotless Mind

  All links at: news.yahoo.com/fc/Science/Brain_Research

Aristotle believed thoughts, feelings, and actions sprung from our hearts, partly because the organ remained warm after death while the brain was cool to the touch. The brain is not much more than a precarious suspension of water and quickly disintegrates when it is not fixed or hardened by formaldehyde or similar substance. Thought is just as fleeting at suspended water, and in a another sense constant, like the pounding in our chests.

The history of brain science begins before the written word. Neolithic tribesman drilled holes in the skulls of fellow tribesmen in order to assist the healing process. Humans have always been the most observant of species, even back in the day, and one or two children probably noticed that friends who hit their head on rocks and broke open their skulls often survived after a bit of an ordeal whereas friends who hit their head just as hard without fracturing the skull ended their ordeal with death. Imagine the courage of a Neolithic shaman/scientist-type who, now an elder, has the inspiration to mimic nature by drilling through the skull of a living and barely breathing tribesman, with family members crowding around the injured party. Trephination it is called, the first neurosurgical procedure, and it is estimated to have provided these early humans a 65% survival rate. Sixty-five percent is impressive given the lack of antiseptics, but perhaps the social environment made up for primitive post-op care. In one archeological site in France 40 of 120 skulls were trephinated, one in three people having undergone therapeutic skull fracture. A bonding experience to say the least.

In an Egyptian papyrus two millennium BCE we find our first mention of the brain itself, but without regard to function. The Egyptians carefully preserved many organs for the afterlife journey but they generally tossed the brain aside during mummification as they saw it of little value. And who of us hasn't met these poor souls, afterlife adventurers who walk the earth with everything but a brain?

Aristotle's mentor believed in a cerebrocentric view of the mind, as did Hippocrates, the father of medicine. Both Plato and Hippocrates considered the brain as the seat of sensation and emotion but it was Aristotle's cardiocentric view which held sway over most people and institutions for centuries. As I tell my students, in the centuries between Ancient Greece and today few people corrected Aristotle when God was silent on an issue. The famed Roman doctor and father of anatomy, Galen, argued convincingly against Aristotle's conception and was a voice of considerable authority, yet only God overruled Aristotle in those days. Fifteen centuries after Galen Shakespeare was still stymied on the issue "Tell me, where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?"

Galen's focus, when it came to the brain, was not of its tissue but of the spaces between, the ventricles, which were filled with spiritual ethers according to him, which we now call cerebral spinal fluid. The brain has four ventricles and according to Galen imagination inhabited the front ventricle, cognition the middle, and memory the posterior ventricle. Not a bad guess, if cerebral spinal fluid could think. Because of the prohibition on human dissection, Galen learned about human brains from fallen Roman gladiators, a quick inspection in the arena or afterwards, supplemented by vivisection of animals such as monkeys or goats. Galen was followed a millennia later by a generation of anatomist led intellectually by Andreas Vesalius who revealed that Galen's anatomy lessons were more animal than human. But Vesalius was interested in anatomy, not physiology, and it would take future generations to focus study on brain function itself.

Descartes in the 17th century believed the soul interfaced with the body in the centralized structure of the pineal gland, a producer of melatonin. Others would suggest the corpus callosum, the great ether cables between the two CPUs (hemispheres), one PC (left, serial) and one Mac (right, graphic/parallel). But the corpus callosum is wiring, the transmitter of thought, not its engine. Fast forward a century to begin the first study of the different thought engines inside the skull.

As a child Franz Gall (1758-1828) noted how verbally superior schoolmates had bulging eyes, and this led him to believe that language abilities resided behind the eyes (suborbital region of frontal lobe), and when overdevelopment in those few, the additional brain tissue pushed out the eyes. This insight, false as it was, was the basis of phrenology, which is the analysis of the shapes and lumps of the skull in order to discern brain development below, another faulty assumption about brain shaping bone. Gall identified 27 basic faculties like imitation, spirituality, veneration. We now use a similar phrenological appoach and rely on neuroimaging instead of tactile inspection of skulls, but we speak of more basic operations such as phoneme processing, hierarchical organization, line orientation detection, etc.

The history of brain science can be considered a battle on two fronts. The western front is the mind-brain correspondence: is there one-to-many (one soul or mind to many physical organelles) or many-to-many (mental operations to a plurality of brain parts)? The eastern front is brain division: is there symmetry or asymmetry, division of labor or redundancy of labor?

Symmetry is a common starting point in any scientific investigation. Francois X. Bichat (1771-1802), who helped found the science of histology, believed in a general law of symmetry in biology. Symmetrical functioning between paired organs was necessary, he argued, because one had to be able to relate to the external world equally with both sides of body. When this principle is applied to the brain we call it cerebral holism or in neuropsychological terminology, diffuse representation. Pierre Flourens (1794-1867) attacked Gall's mind-brain equivalence which he considered materialistic heresies that undermined the unity of the soul, human immortality, free will, and the very existence of God. Talk about having a scientific rival! Flourens' rigorous experimentation actually established functional localization, though not in line with the higher functions Gall was concerned with. Flourens discovered that main divisions of the brain were responsible for largely different functions. When he removed the cerebrum in pigeons or rabbits, he noted how perceptions, motor function, and judgment were abolished. Removal of cerebellum affected equilibrium and motor coordination and destruction of the brain stem caused death.

"The function of the cerebral lobes is to will, to judge, to remember, to see, to hear, or - in a word - to feel. [They] wish and feel; that is their proper action. The suppression of these lobes weakens the activity of the entire nervous system." (Flourens, translated, 1824)

So in a sense Gall's rival validated his paradigm, if not his approach. But the details refuted Gall's. Flourens found no evidence of discrete cortical representation for higher functions, but then again, he didn't really search for higher functions. Identifying veneration or spirituality in a bird would have taken him down a dead-end, so he examined motor function and discovered that extensive cortical lesions had little impact on various motor behaviors. From his work we conclude that we use only 10% of our brain as 90% or more destruction was required before notable function loss occurred. Flourens focused on wing flapping and eating, actions performed by the subcortex, so he mismapped brain and location from the get-go. Had he destroyed the basal ganglia or hypothalamus, discrete functional impairment would have been obvious, or had he focused on higher functions like memory or problem solving (using a 19th century version of a Skinner box, perhaps), he may have hit upon the cortical localization.

Jean-Baptiste Bouillaud (1796-1881) was "the soul of the doctrine of localization" for 50 years. From 1825 to 1860 he defended Gall in debates before French Academie de Medecine. Localization remained a polarizing issue because the contest was between divinity and humanity. The mind may possess many faculties but the brain must be unitary to receive the soul, according to prominent thinkers of the day. Bouillaud (1825) reported on 100 patients with speech loss after frontal lesions. His confidence was such that he offered 500 francs to anyone who could present a case of a frontal lesion not accompanied by a speech disorder. Although aphasia was localized to the frontal lobe, no left or right lobe distinction was yet made, partly due to bad luck. If we look at brain disease and speechlessness rates from clinicians between 1761 to 1840, the work of Morgagni, Bouillaud, and Andral, we find the following:

LHD= left hemisphere damage, RHD= right hemisphere damage

A.  5 LHD - 4 aphasic;    5 RHD - 1 aphasic
B. 11 LHD - 8 aphasic;   14 RHD - 4 aphasic
C.  5 LHD - 3 aphasic;    6 RHD - 0 aphasic

Not enough evidence within anyone's own experience to conclude lateralization of speech, but combined we have speechlessness rates of 15/21 for left brain damage (71%) and 5/25 for right brain damage (20%), pretty convincing. So God or nature spread the evidence across three individual clinicians and only a meta-analysis revealed the truth.

Marc Dax (1836) was a country doctor in southern France who noticed how left brain damage was associated with verbal memory deficits. His son Gustave presented his father's memoirs to the French Academy the same time Broca's investigation of frontal lesions with aphasia were being announced. Paul Broca (1861, 1865) would receive credit for not only convincing the academy that frontal lesions were responsible for aphasia but also for its lateralization to the left hemisphere. "Nous parlons avez l'hemisphere gauche." - we speak with the left hemisphere.

Once an idea has gain purchase in science it often snowballs and the localization paradigm was now established and gaining followers. Carl Wernicke (1874), a German physician and pathologist, discovered that damage to a posterior area of the brain also caused speech disturbances. Gustave Dax also reported on this, but the Daxes were destined for obscurity and the area associated with these speech disturbances is now known as Wernicke's area in the left temporal lobe. Wernicke also developed a connectionism model of language and predicted conduction aphasia from specific damage in the network before any case was found to support it.

But cerebral holism, like many prematurely discredited ideas in science, would not fade away entirely. John Hughlings Jackson, a notable English neurologist, argued for highly interactive hierarchies in the central nervous system and suggested we needed to improve our simple conception of localization:

"To locate the damage which destroys speech and to localise speech [itself] are two different things." (Jackson, 1864)

Jackson also was the first to suggest the right hemisphere was superior for certain functions such as visual recognition. He also noted the motor-sensory division between anterior and posterior cortex. He is the most visionary of 19th century neuroscientist who made this subtle argument, still held as true:

"Emotion uses propositions in a largely interjectional manner, that is to say, reduces them to or towards inferior speech. Emotion, as it were, appropriates and subordinates an intellectual utterance... Loss of speech is, therefore, the loss of power to propositionise." (Jackson, 1864)

The microscope slowed any backward slide toward holism. Korbinian Brodmann (German neurologist 1868-1918) identified 52 cytoarchitectonic brain areas based on cellular types and distrbutions in 1905. He identified how the cerebral cortex contains six distinct layers, except in occipital cortex, and we still rely on Brodmann areas in humans a century later. Here is a good time to bring in some quantification.... A single Brodmann area houses innumerable cells. A single cubic millimeter of cortex, the spatial resolution of current fMRI technology, contains an astounding array of energy-generating and regulating equipment -- about 13,000 pyramidal neurons, twice the number of glial cells, billions of synapses, and one-tenth of a kilometer of axons (Pakkenberg et al, 2003). Each EEG electrode itself spans an area containing 5 million pyramidal neurons or more beneath it (Okamoto et al., 2004). But that is 21st century accounting. In the early 20th century, Harvey Cushing (1869-1939) initiated cortical stimulation work on conscious humans (in 1909). He worked contemporaneously with British physician Henry Head, who argued for significant roles of subcortical structures in language and followed up Jackson's logic:

"The processes which underlie an act of speech run through the nervous system like a prairie fire from bush to bush; remove all inflammable material at any one point and the fire stops. So, when a break occurs in the functional chain, orderly speech becomes impossible, because the basic physiological processes which subserve it have been disturbed... The site of such a breach of continuity is not a 'center for speech', but solely a place where it can be interrupted or changed." (1926).

Wilder Penfield (neurosurgeon, 1891-1976) continued Cushing's method and discovered that electrical stimulation of various locations of the brain led to language disruption and in the temporal lobe episodic memories. Evoking specific memories reliably should have put the final nail in the coffin of holism, but alas, that will probably never come, and for good reason.

In the 1950s Karl Lashley couldn't determine where memories were located in the rat brain. He kept lesioning all parts of their tiny smooth brain and still the rats retained maze- running memories. Lesion size, and not location, determined behavioral consequences. Nevertheless a rat brain is about one-millionth less complicated than a primate's, according to my quick reckoning, and Lashley's principle of mass action was undermined by Irle (1990) who reviewed 283 monkey studies and concluded that location, location, location of lesion was too important. Ironically, some lesions actually led to improved performance, possibly due to reciprocal inhibitory networks, which simply highlights my one-million-times more complex theory.

Karl Pribram was a student of Lashley and he and David Bohm, a colleague of Einstein, independently revived holism on a universal scale, which they called the hologram theories of the brain, or universe (take your pick). Pribram's hypothesis (to downgrade it a bit) argues for existence of memory or function superimposed over all brain tissues, as a hologram. The location of brain function, like the location of photons, appears to be sensitive to how you measure them. Perhaps the mind is everywhere and nowhere at once, or if it has locality, it doesn't like to stay in any one place for very long.

-DK

News & Reviews NEW BOOKS

White Matter in Cognitive Neurosciences
by Cooley's Anemia Symposium 2005 Lake Buen, et al
Papers from the Anemia Symposium 2005 published for Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1573315451/eegspectrum

Neurobiology of Attention
by Laurent Itti, et al
Summary of latest developments in neuroscientific attention research. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0123757312/eegspectrum

Handbook of Neurodevelopmental and Genetic Disorders in Adults
by Sam Goldstein, Cecil R. Reynolds
Neural underpinnings of developmental and genetic disorders for adults. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1593852061/eegspectrum

Essential Neuroscience
by Allan Siegel, Hreday N. Sapru
Textbook of basic neuroscience topics. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0781750776/eegspectrum

Drugs And Society: U.S. Public Policy
by Jefferson M. Fish
Past and present drug policies and their evaluations. --www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0742542459/eegspectrum

Correlation of PET and qEEG in normal subjects. : Thalamic metabolism was negatively correlated with alpha power and medial frontal cortical metabolism was positively correlated with delta EEG power. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16603341

Functional EEG topography in sleep and waking : Sleep deprivation enhances EEG power in delta and theta, regardless of task. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16650779

Neurophysiology of childhood and adolescent bipolar disorder. : Prefrontal, medial temporal, and subcortical limbic structures show functional and structural abnormalities in childhood bipolar disorder. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16641835

Principles of magnetic resonance assessment of brain function. : Describes measurements of oxygenation, blood flow and volume, and measures of connectivity using diffusion tensor imaging for fMRI. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16649206

EEG coherence in mild cognitive impairment : EEG coherences in all bands were higher in a mild cognitive impairment group compared to controls during effort, but similar during rest. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16615165

Contributions of Neocortical Neurons to MEG and EEG Signals. : Pyramidal cell burst discharge may be detectable with scalp EEG when as few as 10,000 neurons are synchronously active. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16613883

EEG power correlations in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder. : OCD patients show slower overall frequency, mostly in frontal sites, and EEG power correlated with scales measures of obsessions and compulsions. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=16554100

Speaking of Karl Pribram (in the Spotlight article, above), I had the privilege of sitting beside him on the podium a few years back (11th Winter Brain, Palm Springs CA, Jan 2003). Earlier I have given a talk called "Do I exist? Ontological Insecurity and Mental Illness" which may have been one reason the program coordinator sat me beside Karl in the Free Will panel. My talk was on psychotherapist RD Laing’s model of ontological insecurity (1959) which I characterized as a metaphysical power play, a struggle for ontological dominance: Which exists more, me or the world?

And by me I meant I and by I I meant we, I think :-)

"An ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security" - RD Laing

In my talk I conceptualized mental illness as cognitive and behavioral consequences of unstable boundaries between an individual’s representation of self-agency (I) and his or her representation of external agency -- i.e., all that is not subject to intimate control, world. Mental illness is conceived as an unstable relation, an imbalance, of I to not-I. The relation of I/world may be plotted along an autistic-to-normal-to-catatonic continuum, according to my model, with social and physiological rewards modulating where the fulcrum is set.

Most individuals set the fulcrum where the culture sets it, consenting to a balance of self-agency and other-agency provided by family members and friends and acceptable to the culture at large. Of course a few ne'er-do-wells either will not or cannot consent to what some may see as an imposed balance and they end up either fighting the wind or changing its course (rarer than rare).

Sebern Fisher and Sig Othmer also shared the podium that day and Sebern in particular didn't care for my idea of autistics as having too much I-ness, too much free will. Be that as it may, criticism doesn't always mean you are wrong, but it does mean that you have gotten someone's attention.

Adding more encumberance to my continuum model of mental health, some consider the anterior temporal poles as interpretative centers of the brain, the buck-stops-here spots, and I concur and consider the temporal poles as where the selves are modelled or generated, a universal self in the left, an autobiographical self in the right (i.e., non-dominant hemisphere). So left is all I-ness, right all not-I-ness. It may sound confusing to call something autobiographical as not-I-ness, but what is an autobiography but a story we tell to ourselves about how we differ from the typical self, how unique our responses are, our resistance in categorizing our thoughts and feelings.

And categorizing is the primary function of the left brain, in a word. The left hemisphere categorizing what it is to think and what it is to be. This categorization leads in part to self-consciousness but categorization itself is not experience, but distance from experience. Categorization is knowledge about experience, consumption and acknowledgment of sensation that purges all that is not relevant to such acknowledgment. And it is the role of categorization in understanding ourselves that sets the bar or positions the fulcrum.

Except in infancy, we neurotypicals (i.e., non-autistics) rarely experience the physical world. We merely infer it. We live high above, in symbolic space, distanced from the world's physicality. We live in a world of knowing, less a world of being.

We know what is likely to happen next. And after that, and soon after that. We've struck a balance of self and world that allows for accurate prediction based on the control our culture has over the physical world. In fact the fulcrum is generally set at the point that allows maximal predictability. But mental illness is a loss of this predictability, due to an instability of self and world representation. Mental illness is a drop from a world of knowing into a world of sensation. Sometimes we drop into fear, sometimes into bliss, but regardless, sensation is always all-encompassing and therefore unpredictable. In neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism and to a lesser extent schizophrenia the individual never learned to climb out of the treetops and jump into the sky and fly like the rest of us. They are left auto-rhythmic, entirely or partially, the world at odds to intervene and help separate the autobiographical self from the universal. -DK